But God is patient, with all the patience of love. The evil that he cannot prevent, because it is born of the freedom in which his omnipotence is at once fulfilled and limited, God will use to open us to his love. Thus death, ‘the wages of sin’, paradoxically becomes a remedy for sin. Precisely because it is against nature, it makes us aware, if we do not run away from it, of our true condition. ‘God suffered man to be swallowed by a great whale, namely the author of man’s transgression, not so that he should thereby perish, but because he was designing and making ready for him a scheme of salvation achieved by the Word “according to the sign of Jonah” … so that, receiving from God unlooked-for salvation, man may rise from the dead and glorify God, repeating the words of Jonah: I cried in my distress to the Lord my God and he heard me from the belly of hell’ (St Irenaeus of Lyons, Adversus Ramses II1.21.1). So God utilizes our subjection to death to prepare, little by little, by election, by Covenant, by proving of faith – salvation now coming nearer, now withdrawing, as humanity accepts or rejects it – to prepare the most favourable conditions (the actual answer being beyond determination) for the fiat of Mary, that final acceptance which allows the dispossessed Creator to re-enter the very heart of his creation to reclaim it from within and, so to speak, recreate it.
Then – ‘out of the belly of hell listen to my supplication, hear my cry’ – then the cross, the cross of light; then the tomb, the life-giving tomb; then the Descent into hell, the victorious Descent, breaking down the ‘dividing wall’. By his self-abasement, his degradation, his passion, his dying the death of the accursed, Christ accepts into himself all hell, all the death of the fallen world, even the terrible accusation of atheism: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ Think what death must have meant for the God-man, who was without any sin for which death might be the consequence or the ‘wages’ or the cure. We are in death. He descended there, who had been able to say, ‘I am the life’. The anguish of that death, encompassing all the evil of the world, and all our deaths, is inconceivable. Consequently all suffering, all hatred, all separation, all death and all our deaths are annihilated; or rather returned, with equal force, as faith, love, unity and life, by him, or in him, who was obedient to the Father even to death, and who, being consubstantial with the Father and the Spirit in the fullness of the Trinity, became consubstantial with us even to hell. So even our hell, even our death, are filled with light, provided only that, in the presence of so great a love, our freedom will allow itself to be moved in response. Hell and death are transformed by him who, giving himself up to them in his sovereign compassion, brings the love stronger than death into the spiritual place where hatred, pride and despair bind together the kingdom of the Separator; thus, in one movement, Christ simultaneously breaks open the tombstones and the gates of hell! ‘Hell was pierced to the heart when it received him who was pierced in the side by the spear, and it was consumed by the divine fire, for the salvation of us who sing: O God our Redeemer, blessed art thou!’
~Olivier Clement, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology
